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Comedy Writer Elwood Ullman, 82, Dies

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Elwood Ullman, a writer of screen comedies for Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, the Bowery Boys, the Three Stooges and Ma and Pa Kettle, is dead.

His brother, Furth, said he was 82 when he died Oct. 11 at his Los Angeles home of an apparent heart attack.

Ullman came to Hollywood in the late 1920s after working as a journalist in St. Louis. Here he worked for Columbia and RKO studios primarily on the two-reel comedies popular in the 1930s and ‘40s. Of the 190 Three Stooges films, Ullman was credited with writing nearly 100 of them.

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He also did feature comedy films, including many of the Abbott and Costello and Martin and Lewis pictures and later in his career some dramas, including “Battle Flame” and “Tickle Me,” an Elvis Presley movie.

Ullman contributed short stories to the Saturday Evening Post, articles to Esquire and Country Gentleman and travel pieces to several newspapers.

His brother is his only survivor.

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